Cooper had carried around a kind of solitude his whole life, always feeling like the odd one out, but he’d never known the kind of bone-deep loneliness prison had to offer. It was like a dark tide that sooner or later would sweep in and drown him for good.
There was still hope inside him, burning like a candle, but he didn’t know how long it could last. The tide was coming to snuff it out.
I’m innocent.
He hadn’t said that out loud since the trial, when it had practically gotten him laughed out of court. And afterwards? He knew exactly how much weight claims of innocence carried after a guilty verdict had been handed down. No one looked innocent in a prison jumpsuit.
Even his old boss, Roger, the only person from his old life who still sometimes visited him and took his phone calls—even Roger didn’t believe him.
The only person who believed Cooper was Cooper himself. His clear conscience was all he had left to keep him sane. And each time he’d told the truth and the person listening to him—even his own lawyer—had rolled their eyes, he’d felt that clarity get a little more tarnished and that sanity a little less sure.
Cooper had had his whole life stripped away from him. In the space of hours, he’d lost his job, his freedom, and the respect of everyone he’d ever known. Now he was shut up inside a box, one that sometimes felt so small and tight he could barely breathe. His griffin’s wings felt like they were atrophying from lack of use, and Cooper hadn’t been able to hear its voice for weeks. It was unreachable, no longer a partner in his body but a ghost.
Last month, on visiting day, Roger had come to see him, and Cooper had tried—subtly—to ask him what happened to shifters who could no longer shift.
Roger was a jaguar shifter from a long line of them, and he had spent years researching and testing the limits of shifter nature: if anyone was going to know the answer, it would be Roger.
But it was a hard conversation to have when other people could overhear you, and it was an even harder conversation to have with a thick pane of security glass separating you. He’d been able to hear the squeak and creak of his hand tightening on the black plastic phone that connected the prisoner’s side with the visitor’s side.
“People like us—people like our team—”
Roger had nodded, cutting him off before he’d needed to bungle through that even further. Federal law enforcement was quietly, vaguely aware of shifters, and it sometimes grouped them together, creating scattered all-shifter units: Roger had recruited Cooper onto his team of shifter US Marshals just a year before Cooper’s arrest.
Despite everything that had happened, Cooper was grateful for that. If Roger hadn’t recruited him, maybe bad luck would have still reached down and tapped him on the shoulder, stranding him in this hell—and then he wouldn’t have had anyone he could ask this question.
“I know what you mean,” Roger had said.
“When we’re in situations like this, situations where we’re boxed in, do we ever... lose what makes us different?”
Roger’s red-brown eyes had sharpened. “Do you feel like that’s happening to you?”
“I haven’t been able to reach you-know-who in a while,” Cooper had said, knowing Roger would understand that he meant his griffin. “When I look, there’s just... nothing.”
Roger had never claimed to believe in Cooper’s innocence; he just visited him out of a sense of lingering duty, looking glum and resigned like some disappointed father. But now his voice was so heavy with sympathy that it was hard for Cooper to hear it. It was bad news that Roger thought he deserved that.
“That happens sometimes. It’s not like riding a bike: you can’t just take a break for years and expect to come back like nothing’s happened. If you don’t use it, you lose it.”
Cooper’s throat had suddenly felt parched, like it was packed full of sawdust. He’d tried to swallow. “Then you mean... forever? It goes away forever?”
But that felt so wrong. He had never felt like shifting was something he’d learned how to do: it wasn’t like he’d been born with a gift for music and then had learned how to play the piano. His griffin wasn’t a skill; it was part of who he was. It was like Roger was telling him that part of his soul would wither away and die inside these walls. Literally.
Roger had nodded. “I’m so sorry, Cooper. Forever.”
That word had been echoing around in Cooper’s head ever since.
Forever. He could lose his griffin forever.
He would lose his griffin forever.
It was even possible that he already had.
No wonder he couldn’t concentrate on the paperback western he was trying to read. It didn’t help that it was about the exact kind of brave US Marshal that he’d never be again.
I thought it was about cowboys, Cooper thought plaintively. The cover looked like it was just cowboys. Nobody was wearing a Marshal star, or I wouldn’t have picked it up in the first place. I’m a victim of false advertising.
He stood up off the short rack of bleachers and stretched, trying to breathe in as much of the freezing, clear winter air as possible, like that would be enough to rouse his griffin.
It wasn’t.
He poked at it. Buddy?
Silence.
His eyes burned, and he told himself that it was just from the wind in his face.
He needed a distraction. Something, anything. Anything that would get him out of his own head. He opened his book again—
And then a skinny, ferret-faced guy popped up in his face.
“Hey, hey, hey,” the ferret-faced guy said. “You want to step out on the court? You want to shoot some hoops?”
He was
